patristic and the Middle Ages, was certainly in that direction.
Christians were persecuted and defenceless, and they betook
themselves to the only virtues which they had the opportunity of
practising--gentleness, patience, resignation, self-sacrifice, and
self-devotion--all that is loveliest in the ideal female character.
And God forbid that that side of the Christian life should ever be
undervalued. It has its own beauty, its own strength too made
perfect in weakness; in prison, in torture, at the fiery stake, on
the lonely sick-bed, in long years of self-devotion and resignation,
and in a thousand womanly sacrifices unknown to man, but written for
ever in God's book of life.

But as time went on, and the monastic life, which, whether practised
by man or by woman, is essentially a feminine life, became more and
more exclusively the religious ideal, grave defects began to appear
in what was really too narrow a conception of the human character.

The monks of the Middle Ages, in aiming exclusively at the virtues
of women, generally copied little but their vices. Their unnatural
attempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done
little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and
more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and
unprincipled women. They were too apt to be cunning, false,
intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles
declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as
their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most
virulent language against all who differed from them; they were, at
times, fearfully cruel, as evil women will be; cruel with that worst
cruelty which springs from cowardice. If I seem to have drawn a
harsh picture of them, I can only answer that their own documents